Lucille Clifton by Emily Jorgenson
One thing Clifton mentions in this video that really sticks out to me, is the "lack of reverence for life that doesn't look like themselves." This can apply to plant life and animals in the environmental world, as well as just different groups of people and minorities. This is an important lesson that applies to a majority, if not all, of Lucille Clifton’s poetry. She wants to give a sense of clarity and understanding for lives different than our own, and therefore evoke a sense of sympathy towards those lives, even if it is referring to a plant.
Where does this human view of nature come from?
The Anthropocene
According to the Smithsonian website, the Anthropocene, in a geological sense, is hard to confirm due to the uncertain starting point to human impact on the earth. Stratigraphers simply cannot find evidence to support the idea of a new epoch, however pop culture has not let the idea of Anthropocene fade away. This idea is still very present in pop culture and art, because even if there may not be geographical evidence for the Anthropocene, there is no doubt that humans have impacted the world they live in. The root of this word “anthropo” means “man” which means that Anthropocene is not only a human idea, but the most basic definition of the word is innately human. So, not only does the Anthropocene have to do with how humans impact nature, but it also involved how humans treat other humans and how that has impacted our world.
So how does this go back to poetry again?
I am glad you asked.
Poetry serves as a vehicle to increase our understanding of something in the world, in the instance: the Anthropocene. Poetry can help clarify human interaction with nature and how that impacts nature in human terms. There is no way for us to truly know how nature “feels” about us exploiting it for our own benefit, but poetry and art can give nature feelings and a sense of humanity that helps the audience understand truly how we are treating nature.
Anthropocene art emphasizes the relationship between humanity and nature by drawing parallels between the human experience of oppression with the way we exploit nature, also calling to attention the way human oppression of other humans has impacted our world as well.
One poet that uses this view of Anthropocene art in her poetry, is Lucille Clifton who was featured above.
Background on Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is an American poet who lived from 1936 to 2010 when she died of cancer. Her first book Good Times was published in 1969 and was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York times. She was nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes for her works Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Two-Headed Woman. She did not win the Pulitzer Prize, but she won many others such as an Emmy, the Shelley Memorial Award, as well as two fellowships with the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, Clifton was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets which advocates the importance of poetry and serves as an ambassador for poetry around the country. From 1979-1985 she served as poet laureate for her home state of Maryland.
Many of her works focus on African-American or female oppression and the intersectionality between the two, however I think her environmental works comparing humanity to nature prove her to be a prominent Anthropocene artist.
Further analysis on “the killing of the trees”
We already looked at this poem above, but now that we have established Anthropocene art and Lucille Clifton’s role in that, we can look more specifically at how this poem fits in.
Like it was stated in the video above, Clifton was inspired to write this poem when she saw trees getting cut down in order to build more houses. She saw the tree falling and thought of this specific picture of a Native American warrior fallen on the Trail of Tears. Clifton uses this inspiration to draw parallels between this falling tree and the fallen Native American warrior so convincingly that you may believe these creatures are one in the same, rather than completely different species.
Many of Clifton’s works focus on the African-American or female experience because she can directly relate to both of those causes, but this poem is a bit difference with the Native American warrior as the mode for parallel to the tree being cut down. Clifton has no Native American heritage, so it is uncertain whether she has authority to speak on the oppression of Native American people, since it is a unique experience that she has no direct connection too. This problem is addressed in the poem itself. Rachel Elizabeth Harding states that through the final stanza of the poem Clifton acknowledges that she is a bystander to this tree getting cut down as well as the Native American experience. She acknowledges that she is a witness with “one good eye” meaning she cannot fully sympathize with her subject, but she can still sympathize and stand in solidarity with them.
The imagery Clifton makes it seem like this warrior and this tree were one in the same. “The slim feathered branches” combine the branches of trees with the traditional Native American headdress. This line from the second stanza: “his bark skin brown and not so much wrinkled as circled with age” compares the man’s skin to bark and his wrinkles like the circles formed inside an aging tree trunk. These metaphors and this imagery helps create these parallel views between the oppression of the Native American people in the Trail of Tears with the cutting down of trees.
This allows the reader to feel some sort of human connection with nature, even if the reader has no personal connection with the Trail of Tears or the Native American experience. Clifton gives this tree a face and a life, so that the reader can form a connection with nature that is what the Anthropocene is all about. She discusses in the video above how humanity often has a “lack of reverence for life that doesn’t look like themselves,” so she makes the life look like us, by comparing it to a human experience.
Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism
This untitled poem from Clifton’s collection the good news about the earth connects slavery with the way humans treat nature. Like I have said before, Clifton draws parallels between minority oppression, in this case African-American slavery, and the exploitation of nature. Clifton discusses the personal connection she has with the environment because it is treated as property in the same way that slaves were treated as property without any intrinsic value outside of human use.
This poem connects to the idea of ecowomanism which parallels the African-American female experience with environmental exploitation. It also argues that African-American women have a greater wisdom when it comes to environmental justice issues and how to deal with them. This idea directly involves the Anthropocene because it connects these women to nature in a way that inspires a new relationship with the environment. Lucille Clifton has a special relationship with the environment that she expresses in this poem due to the ideas discussed in ecowomanism.
Another way of looking at the Anthropocene that is a bit broader, but of similar context to ecowomanism is ecofeminism. Ecofeminism finds parallels between the history of female oppression and environmental exploitation. It acknowledges the intersectionality women have with other parts of their identity like ethnicity, religion, and other things, and how that can connect to the intersectionality of nature and all of its many parts and forms. Ecowomanism is more specific in its ideas of wisdom and its specificity toward African-American women, however it would not exist without the creation of ecofeminism, and both of these topics are innately human as well as environmental which connects them to the Anthropocene.
Clifton's works as a whole
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton contains all of Clifton's poems throughout her career. Through this collection I was able to grasp an overall idea of her body of work, and it is a large body of work. The book contains over 700 pages of Lucille Clifton's brilliant words, so she was far from silent. Her poems deal with many topics such as slavery, cancer, religion, nature, feminism, family, and more, but one thing that most of her poems have in common is the Anthropocene. The only reason I say most, is that I have not read every single one of her poems, so I cannot justify arguing that all of her poems involve the Anthropocene.
Clifton's works are all about human experience and suffering in some way. A lot of her poems involve human suffering at the hands of other humans, which is included in the idea of the Anthropocene, because this suffering has impacted our world as a whole. Ideas that plague our earth such as racism, sexism, white supremacy, and others have emerged from the oppression of humans, by humans, and this is an important part of the Anthropocene that Lucille Clifton addresses in her poems. The Anthropocene also involves the human impact on nature and how we can better understand that impact. Clifton draws parallels from human suffering to show how we are treating nature as if it has no intrinsic value other than human consumption. These important ideas are all included in Clifton's large body of work and also qualify her as an Anthropocene artist.
SOURCES
Clifton, Lucille. “the killing of the trees.” Quilting: Poems 1987-1990, BOA Editions, 1991.
Clifton, Lucille. “being property once myself.” Good News About the Earth, Random House, 1972.
“Lucille Clifton, The Killing of the Trees” Youtube. uploaded by CSMDTube, 16 June 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vba8o-7xhU0
Harding, Rachel Elizabeth. "Authority, History, and Everyday Mysticism in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton: A Womanist View." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 36-57. EBSCOhost, libproxy.xu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2014394251&login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Harris, Melanie L. "Ecowomanism: Black Women, Religion, and the Environment." Black Scholar, vol. 46, no. 3, Fall2016, p. 27. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00064246.2016.1188354.
Kings, A. E. "Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism." Ethics & the Environment, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 63-87. EBSCOhost, libproxy.xu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eih&AN=123188814&site=eds-live&scope=site.
“Lucille Clifton.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lucille-clifton.
Stromberg, Joseph. “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Jan. 2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/.
